Bruegel The Harvester

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The Harvesters painted by Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525 -1569) in 1565 is an oil painting on a 3.8 ft x 5.25 ft wooden surface. It shows a genre scene of peasants working in a hay field. A tree in the painting divides the panel into two while the peasants are flowing throughout the foreground. On the lower right corner of the painting the peasants are crowded together in a circular formation taking a break on a spread out pile of hay, most of them eating. Within the group, there is one man who looks super exhausted which shows how hard and tiring the work must be. On the left side of the foreground and the middle ground on the right side shows the peasants hard at work harvesting the hay. The men are cutting the hay while the …show more content…

The landscape consists of hills of golden hay overlooking the small town and a body of water in the distance. There are several trees and fields of grass down the hill, separating the masses of yellow hills. Bruegel paints the trees and bushes like how they would be like in real life, although it looks like some parts are exaggerated it creates the texture needed. In real life, you can sometimes see through the leaves of a bush or a tree, the individual branches extending into smaller branches, and the details on the trunk of the tree are recreated. The tree that is dividing the composition seems looks kind of transparent. All the shapes used in this painting are more organic than linear, showing little human interference in their environment. He adds small strokes in the bundles and field of harvested and unharvested hay to distinct one strand from another so they are read as hay instead of masses of yellow lying around on the ground. The small strokes also illustrate the texture of the field. Because the artist is on higher grounds than the workers, the view of the landscape is more visible and massive. To recreate how grand the view is he uses sfumato to give a sense of depth in the painting. The still bodies of water reflect the gray sky. In the distance, there are boats close to shore while the ponds by the hills have a mini island in

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